The Islamist Thread: From Gaza to the Western Street

Oct 17, 2026 · @Hannan Lis

Islam is a faith. Islamism is a political program.

Start with the distinction, because everything else depends on it. Islam is the religion of nearly two billion people, most of whom want what everyone wants: to raise their children in peace and prosper. Islamism is something else. It is a modern political ideology, born in the twentieth century with the Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's revolution, that treats religion as a blueprint for the state and treats armed struggle as a religious duty.

Confusing the two is both a moral error and an analytical one. Blaming Muslims for Islamism is bigotry. Refusing to name Islamism for fear of offending Muslims is cowardice, and it leaves the people who suffer most under Islamist rule, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, without allies.

My argument is simple. Islamism is the organizing principle of one side in every active war in the Middle East. And it is the hidden organizing principle of the anti-Israel movement in the West. Until the West understands this, it will keep misreading both.

One side of the war shares one ideology

Look at who is actually shooting at Israel. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen. The militias in Iraq. Behind all of them, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which built the Axis of Resistance as a network of armed groups spanning Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Not one of these is a nationalist movement with a border dispute. Every one is an Islamist movement with a theology. Sunni or Shia, Brotherhood or Khomeinist, they share the same core claim: a Jewish state on Muslim land is illegitimate, and fighting it is a religious obligation that no treaty can cancel.

That is why the usual diplomatic toolkit keeps failing. You can negotiate a border. You cannot negotiate with a doctrine that defines compromise as betrayal of God.

Why they cannot stand down

The last year proved the point. The October 2025 ceasefire gave Hamas every exit it could want: the hostages released, a technocratic committee to run Gaza, an Arab-backed reconstruction plan. Hamas dissolved its government and still refused to disarm. A movement whose entire legitimacy rests on armed resistance cannot lay down its weapons without ceasing to exist.

Hezbollah did the same. When the American-Israeli war on Iran began in February 2026, Hezbollah entered the fight over the objections of its own government, dragging Lebanon back into a war Lebanon did not choose. The Houthis, who had gone quiet after the Gaza ceasefire, resumed missile fire on Israel within days. Iraq's new government now faces a deadline to disarm militias that answer to Tehran rather than Baghdad.

The pattern is the same in every capital. Lebanon cannot disarm Hezbollah. Gaza cannot be rebuilt around an armed Hamas. Iraq cannot be sovereign with Iranian militias in its streets. The Islamist movement in each place has made itself the veto on the state's future. The wars are not paused. They are waiting.

The same ideology, translated for the Western street

Islamism did not create Western hostility to Israel. It organized it, gave it a vocabulary, and removed the exit ramp of compromise. It did this through three channels.

The organizations. The infrastructure of campus and street activism in America and Britain, from Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine to the Muslim Association of Britain and Friends of Al-Aqsa, grew out of networks the Muslim Brotherhood built in the West from the 1980s onward. The Holy Land Foundation trial in the United States and the British government's 2015 Brotherhood review documented the lineage. These groups do not present as Islamist. They present as human-rights advocates. But the frame they supply is Islamist in origin: Israel as an illegitimate colonial implant, not a state with a border to negotiate.

The slogans. "From the river to the sea." "Globalize the intifada." October 7 as "resistance." These are not the words of a peace movement. They are the Hamas Charter's position, laundered into the language of decolonization. Most of the Western marchers chanting them have no idea where they came from. That is the point. Secular progressives who would reject everything Hamas believes about women, gays and dissenters now carry Hamas's political program without noticing the contradiction.

The alliance. After 2001, Islamist organizations and the hard left discovered that anti-imperialism gave them a shared enemy, and Israel became the one cause they could champion together without arguing about anything else. In Britain the red-green alliance built the Stop the War Coalition and reshaped the Labour Party under Corbyn. In America it produced the intersectional doctrine that puts Palestine at the center of every progressive cause, from climate to policing. Islamism supplied the target. The left supplied the crowds.

The honest objections

Serious people will push back, and they deserve a serious answer.

They will say most Western anger at Israel comes from images out of Gaza, not from any ideology. True, and irrelevant. Grief and anger are raw material. Someone has to turn them into a program, and the program that won is the one that says Israel should not exist. That program has an author.

They will say Islamism is not monolithic, that the Sunni Brotherhood and Shia Iran are rivals, that Turkey and Qatar back Hamas while opposing Tehran. Also true. Rivals can still share a goal. On Israel, they do.

They will say Jewish anti-Zionists owe nothing to the Brotherhood, and that occupation, state failure and sectarian dysfunction are real grievances. Granted. But every one of those grievances existed under secular Arab nationalism, and Arab nationalism eventually made peace. It took Islamism to make the grievances unresolvable.

What the West needs to understand

The West keeps asking the wrong question. It asks what Israel must concede for peace. The right question is what the other side is fighting for. If the answer is a state alongside Israel, there is a deal to be made, and Israel has made such deals before, with Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf. If the answer is the end of Israel as a religious duty, there is nothing to negotiate and everything to defend.

The same clarity is owed to the Western street. A student chanting for the intifada is not a peace activist. A city council passing a river-to-the-sea resolution is not taking a stand for human rights. They are carrying water for a movement that would abolish every freedom they enjoy. Telling them so is not Islamophobia. It is respect, because it treats them as adults who can be held to the meaning of their own words.

Name the ideology. Separate it from the faith. Stop pretending the war is about borders when one side has told us, for decades, that it is about God.